


Delhi

by eudaimon



Series: Our Lives Apart [5]
Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-12
Updated: 2012-07-12
Packaged: 2017-11-09 20:26:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/458032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Personified Cities #1.  The city on the banks of the Ganges location of Raj Ghat, where Gandhi was cremated.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Delhi

**Author's Note:**

> Personified Cities #1. The city on the banks of the Ganges location of Raj Ghat, where Gandhi was cremated.

 The Ghat at dusk. The flat slab of marble where they burn the bodies. When love came to India, his name was Mahatma Gandhi. They cremated him here, and it's as though the river remembers the loss. The candles spread and spill; the light catches and refracts in an oily rainbow sheen. Delhi is an old girl with her long, braided hair the colour of bone. Her sari is bridal red, edged in flickering lights and fraying braid. She still wears her wedding gold, and her hands move like she's gathering a squalling infant to her skinny breast. She tells me about how a woman is unclean for seven days while she's bleeding, and how a child might render its mother pure for a whole year. She is a young woman, an old woman, a mother, flickering in the light from the candles.

 

Perpetually divided.

 

We sit on the grass and watch a teenage boy walk down towards the water, a tin urn in hand. She tells me the story of the Yamuna river, sister of the Ganges, Krishna's favourite. There are no elephants west of the banks of the Yamuna, and, in her way, she's as holy as the great Ganges, Mother Ganges, flowing south. The story is: bathe in the Yamuna, let your head go under, and the next breath you take, you'll be entirely free from fear of death.

 

I watch the young man scattering the ashes of his beloved mother, who once wore bridal red and wedding gold, and I think...it might be nice to be free from fear of death. I close my eyes and imagine this woman, like the woman sitting beside me, impossibly tall, wide as the river, a foot for either bank with her painted hands holding up the whole sky. By tomorrow, she'll reach the point at which the Yamuna yawns and wraps her arms around the Taj, a tomb tucked into an elbow bend.

 

Delhi laughs and sucks air through chipped and yellowing teeth, swirls weak chai in a cup many times broken and mended. _Always a dead woman,_ she says, slurping and rolling her eyes at me. There's a very particular smell to her skin; sweet, like rotting leaves or too ripe fruit. Monsoon is a moving season and it clings in the hair and the clothes. _Always a dead woman, be it a funeral pyre or a dutiful son._ These things have happened here before. She'll see them here again.

 


End file.
